The present invention provides a system for managing and tracking one or more information entities associated with one or more operations, with the or each entity capable of being cross-referenced with the or each operation so as to augment a network of information that is storable in the system and accessible through corresponding applications.
Today technology information from a process development, such as a CMOS process development derived from simulation, test productions, tests or measurements is usually kept informally and non-systematically on paper, in electronic spread sheets, or merely in the minds of the process engineers and is hence hardly accessible for use in future process development projects or process porting activities. Furthermore development data or development artifacts, e.g., SEM images, test results, run cards etc., are mostly stored in an unstructured, unrelated way resulting in insufficient reproducibility, less knowledge gain, less development control, less statistical data etc. Therefore there is a strong need for the use of structured formal methods and business/development processes to store this data in a way that makes retrieval and reuse of collected data/knowledge possible and easy to manage.
One major source for this unstructured storage of process development artifacts is, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to define a generic categorization that is always valid which could be used to structure the data. Because of this, it is necessary to be able to access this process development data from diverse points of views. To achieve this, a general and flexible measure is required to store the data in such a way allowing these different views to be created easily from a single representation. This invention proposes such a generic storage mechanism.
No current software system takes care of the above mentioned insufficiencies to the full extent. Some parts are addressed by the products such as CoreDB, OperatorDB and Process Flow of PhoenixBV, which take care of the process parameter and flow storage of the performed processing. Other tools like Promis, marketed by Brooks Automation, are more focused on issues related to the management of production lines, like fab monitoring, yield improvements, and are not targeted for process development where a lot of experiments/simulations are required to generate an appropriate process flow for the intended devices. The basic difference between these two areas is that during the development a lot of process step combinations and step parameters settings are tested to adjust the final device properties into the intended area of operation. The production control area is more focused on a smaller amount of different processes with a much lesser degree of freedom in the steps and therefore more emphasis is placed on the statistical evaluation and comparison between intended and actual properties.
The above mentioned, commercially available tools miss features incorporating all kinds of measurements results, e.g., pictures, material composition analysis sheets, development related documentation, cause-and-effect analysis results and so on into the knowledge base. Because of this they miss out a major part of knowledge conservation and knowledge generation because they do not provide the possibility of closing the loop and comparing a real result with predicted result and use the differences to recalibrate the knowledge base.